This invention relates to a system of controlling the operation, display and or supervision of various plants, more particularly to a system of automatic operation of plants wherein the preparation and changing of programs for automatically operating plants by an electronic digital computer system are made easy.
The invention is especially suitable for automatic operation of plants of a large scale. As one typical example, the invention will hereinafter be described as applied to the automatic operation of a steam electric power generating plant, but it should be understood that the invention is equally applicable to a hydroelectric power generating plant, an atomic energy electric power generating plant, or a chemical industrial plant and many other plants. With recent development of electronic digital computer systems (hereinafter merely termed computer), computers have been used for the automatic operation of plants for the operation and supervision thereof, and the fields of automatic operation are broadened year after year.
A steam electric generating plant (hereinafter merely termed plant) generally comprises such main machines and apparatus as a boiler, steam turbine, generator, transformers and circuit breakers and many other auxiliary machines and apparatus. In order to maintain the plant at the best operating condition it is necessary to vary the operating conditions of various component elements of the plant in accordance with their characteristics and operating standards to meet the varying operating conditions of the plant. For this reason, in order to operate a steam electric generating plant at high efficiencies it is necessary to predetermine the operating procedures of the component elements based on their characteristics and operating standards in accordance with varying operating conditions of the plant. To manually operate the plant, the operator usually judges what operation should be made according to an operation instruction book and the condition of the plant at that time.
Prior art methods of automatically controlling plants are classified into (1) a sub-loop control, (2) a wired logic or sequence control and (3) a computer control which are outlined as follows.